We are often reminded of how immediate his bodily self impacted on his psyche. Her novelist’s skills also come into their own in evoking the physical texture of everyday life in London (tantalisingly overlapping with Shakespeare’s time there). Rundell is very good on how transgressive desire drives so much of the work (sexual desire, and, desire for God’s attention, famously coming - yes, I know - together in the outrageous imagery of his sonnet ‘Batter my heart’). …then there was the transformation of himself: from failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you. We are, he believed, creatures born transformable. In this Latin preposition – ‘across, to the other side of, over, beyond’ – he saw both the chaos and potential of us. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London.ĭonne loved the trans- prefix: it’s scattered everywhere across his writing – ‘transpose’, ‘translate’, ‘transport’, ‘transubstantiate’. John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. The Contents page presents us with the tantalising titles of a series of intriguing stories: ‘Brother to a Dead Man’, ‘The Paradoxical Quibbler, Taking Aim at Women’, ‘The Ambivalent Father’, ‘The (Unsuccessful) Adventurer’, and in her 300 pages Rundell charts the stepping stones of this unfurling narrative, in what she calls an act of evangelism: I first came across Rundell because my daughter enjoys her children’s fiction, like Rooftoppers and The Explorer, which suggests she knows how to tell a story, a talent manifestly evident in Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne. The most electric piece of literary criticism I read as a teen and thereby set me on the road to Donne.

Now comes Katherine Rundell, who thanks Carey for his formidable generosity in his reading of her text. Christopher Hill rightly called it fierce and enthralling. I have in front of me now a book (pictured at the bottom) that was definitely up to the job, which I bought in 1983, John Carey’s John Donne: Life, Mind and Art.

Teaching his poems again recently confirmed to me yet again just how brilliant he is, just how thrilling his works are, and how accessible they can be to 21st century pupils: the bravura, the fragile confidence, the outrageous imagery, the sly humour, the anxiety, the fabulous facility with form. You need to be both highly intelligent and a really fizzy writer to take on John Donne.

John donne rundell